Download My Losing Season: A Memoir by Pat Conroy PDF

NEW YORK occasions BESTSELLER • A deeply affecting coming-of-age memoir approximately family members, love, loss, basketball—and lifestyles itself—by the cherished writer of The Prince of Tides and The nice Santini in the course of one unforgettable season as a castle cadet, Pat Conroy turns into a part of a basketball crew that's eventually destined to fail. And but for an army child who grew up at the circulate, the Bulldogs supply a sanctuary from the chilly, abrasive father who dominates his life—and a crucible for changing into his personal man.

With the entire drama and incandescence of his bestselling fiction, Conroy re-creates his pivotal senior 12 months as captain of the castle Bulldogs. He chronicles the highs and lows of that fateful 1966–67 season, his tricky disciplinarian trainer, the thrill of profitable, and the hard-won classes of wasting. such a lot of all, he recounts how a bunch of boys got here jointly as a workforce, taking part in a game that might develop into a metaphor for a guy whose spirit might by no means be defeated.

Praise for My wasting Season “A wonderful accomplishment, possibly the best publication Pat Conroy has written.”—The Washington put up publication World

“A splendidly wealthy memoir that you just don’t must be a activities fan to love.”—Houston Chronicle

This version of Bloom's significant Novelists examines the paintings of the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Literature, Toni Morrison. incorporated is an research of what a few critics view as her most powerful novel, music of Solomon. different works studied during this textual content contain The Bluest Eye, Sula, tune of Solomon, and cherished.

"When i used to be 11 the area used to be jam-packed with birds," writes Lisa Knopp of her girlhood in Burlington, Iowa. making a choice on up the place she left off in her rst booklet, field of regard, Knopp knits jointly sections of her lifestyles tale via a trend of pictures drawn from nature. the main time-honored of those unifying topics are metaphors of flight--birds, wind, relocating upward and outward and around the midwestern panorama from Nebraska and Iowa to southern Illinois.

This quantity is a severe spouse to the works of Herta Müller, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2009. Müller (1953-) is a Romanian-German novelist, essayist and manufacturer of collages whose paintings has been in comparison with that of W. G. Sebald and Franz Kafka. The Nobel Committee defined her as a author 'who, with the focus of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the panorama of the dispossessed'.

I was never a very good player, but the sport allowed me glimpses into the kind of man I was capable of becoming. I exulted in the pure physicality of that ceaseless, ever-moving sport, and when I found myself driving the lane beneath the hot lights amid the pure electric boisterousness of crowds humming and screaming as a backdrop to my passion, my chosen game, this love of my life, I was the happiest boy who ever lived. Where did all those games go, the ones I threw myself headlong into as a boy, a rawboned kid who fell in love with the smell and shape of a basketball, who longed for its smooth skin on the nerve endings of my fingers and hands, who lived for the sound of its unmistakable heartbeat, its staccato rhythms, as I bounced it along the pavement throughout the ten thousand days of my boyhood?

He is an excellent offensive pivot man and is rated as one of the best pivot men in the Southern Conference. Second in scoring last year with 314 points for an average of just over 15 points per game, Mohr was our top rebounder with 156 points in 20 games. 6 points. The year's experience should make Doug one of our most consistent players. Bob Cauthen saw considerable action as a sophomore. He has displayed hustle and heart. The year's experience should improve Bob's overall performance and we expect him to have a good year.

The ability of these boys to adjust to Varsity competition will be a key factor in our success this season. We veterans knew something the sophomores would learn quickly. Each player would have to submit himself to trial by Mel Thompson, a season-long initiation in which our coach would search for the soft spots and breaking points of his newest players, then would go to work on them with a cruel finesse. By doing this, Mel thought he was making his players tougher and more resilient when the games came down to the wire.